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<div class="essay" id="body.1_div.1"><h3 align="center">Response: Mere Antiquarianism</h3><p xmlns=""><strong>Jonah Siegel</strong><br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/><strong>Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey</strong></p>
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<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>1</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At the home of a friend, some years back, while turning over the pages of a volume I was happy to see on his shelves, I came across an all-too-typical characterization of the term motivating this special issue: "The passionate reach of cultural institutions evidenced in these moments suggests that what is at stake in the arrangement of the past," the text declared in a passage I found marked by a reader, presumably my host, "is not <em xmlns="">mere antiquarianism</em>, the turning over and charting of mute rubble." The fact that the historian I was visiting was an expert on seventeenth-century antiquarian circles made my eye pause over the marked lines in a text I myself had written with the special panic one has come to associate with the sense that it is too late for second thoughts, that faults in print can never be fully retracted (Siegel, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Desire</span> 3). Certainly I had been right to note that the passionate relationships to antiquity manifested in the writings of Hazlitt, Keats, and other authors and artists were distinct from those typically expressed in the texts of antiquarians. Still, I found myself wondering in the home of my friend, the author of a study of the great Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Pereisc (1580-1635) and his broad international network of correspondents, as I have again at various times since, why I had felt compelled to use that particular formulation. "<em xmlns="">Mere</em> antiquarianism"&mdash;the epithet has the flavor of an unexamined slander, the pushy demand that unknown interlocutors share in one's unexamined prejudice against something we would agree to call antiquarianism, a practice that, according to my younger self, involved nothing more complicated than the abject manipulation of unresponsive and uncommunicative debris. (And then, turning over and charting rubble that does not speak to one, is a characterization that hesitates unsteadily between being simply an uncharitable description and an allegory of impotent effort or unrequited passion, as though antiquarians were so many superannuated lovers courting a stony beloved utterly indifferent to their attentions.) </p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>2</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I cite a formulation I have found ever-more embarrassing with the passing of time because&mdash;as Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake helpfully lay out in their Introduction to this special issue&mdash;its terms are evidently symptomatic of more than my own youthful carelessness. Their account makes a thought-provoking stop at Nietzsche, who may have been my own forgotten influence (along with Walter Pater), but we can also look far more locally for the sources of the prejudice to which I gave voice. Indeed, with its cruel use of parentheses and italics the dictionary definition of "antiquary" quickly demonstrates the long-standing nature of the problem: "A student (usually a <em xmlns="">professed</em> student), or collector, of antiquities." To the stigma of autodidacticism is added the fraud of self-accreditation (not a professor, but a self-professed student). And then the tension between collecting and studying is written into the definition because "student" and "collector" are not symmetrical terms. To study <em xmlns="">because</em> one has collected things might simply be to apply a thin veneer of reason to disguise the uneven surface marked out by one's passion. To collect because one wants to study, on the other hand, approaches what we call the scientific method. The citations in the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Oxford English Dictionary</span> are historically revealing: both of the occurrences of the term from before the eighteenth century are positive, while the ones from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are characterized by patronizing irony:
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1587&nbsp;&nbsp; A. Fleming et al. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Holinshed's Chron.</span> (new ed.) III. Contin. 1272/1&nbsp;&nbsp; It hath beene some question amongst the best antiquaries of our age, that, [etc.]<br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
1602&nbsp;&nbsp; W. Warner <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Epitome Hist. Eng.</span> in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Albions Eng.</span> (rev. ed.) 351&nbsp;&nbsp; Our learned and studious Antiquarie Master Camden.<br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
1786&nbsp;&nbsp; H. Walpole <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Vertue's Anecd. Painting</span> (ed. 4) I. iv. 134&nbsp;&nbsp; We antiquaries, who hold every thing worth preserving, merely because it has been preserved.<br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
1836&nbsp;&nbsp; H. Smith <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Tin Trumpet</span> I. 37&nbsp;&nbsp; Antiquary&mdash;Too often a collector of valuables that are worth nothing, and a recollector of all that Time has been glad to forget.
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It is a precipitous decline from "best" and "learned" and "studious," to those easy if amusing paradoxes that suggest not learning but obsession. The circular reasoning involved in preserving what has been preserved, the confusion of value with its opposite, the clinging on to what time itself is happy to cast into oblivion: these are characterizations appropriate for neurotics, not for the learned and studious&mdash;or perhaps they are the neuroses <em xmlns="">of</em> the learned and studious. </p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>3</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Antiquarian<em xmlns="">ism</em>" describes no downward trajectory of the sort "Antiquary" does, but that's because it begins its career late, and therefore at a pretty low point for reflection on the topic. From the late eighteenth century, when the termed gained currency, definitions do little in the way of identifying a serious human endeavor: "The profession or pursuits of the antiquarian; taste for, or devotion to, antiquities." <em xmlns="">Taste</em> is, of course, the thing about which we cannot argue, and so it is immediately outside the pale of rational discourse; <em xmlns="">devotion</em>, bears more than a suggestion of personal passion or even of an idiosyncratic idolatry. And, evidently, this is a use of <em xmlns="">profession</em> far from the modern one. Then come the citations:
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<em xmlns="">a</em>1779&nbsp;&nbsp; Bp. W. Warburton <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Lett.</span> No. 221 (T.)&nbsp;&nbsp; I used to despise him for his antiquarianism.<br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
1803&nbsp;&nbsp; W. Taylor in <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Ann. Rev.</span> 1 439&nbsp;&nbsp; He views the earth, neither through the telescope of antiquarianism, nor the microscope of topography.<br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
1849&nbsp;&nbsp; E. A. Freeman <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Hist. Archit.</span> 4&nbsp;&nbsp; The first phase of ecclesiology was simple antiquarianism.
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A despicable practice that distances itself from the earth while pretending to try to view it more closely, a simple phase that must be left behind: instances such as these clearly demonstrate the long pedigree of the bias I evidenced so unreflectively in my own writing. Still, in the strands of evidence the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">OED</span> offers we find one bright thread in the words of Samuel Johnson, who understood the passions of thought better than most:
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="blockquote">1778&nbsp;&nbsp; Johnson <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Let.</span> 23 Apr. in J. Boswell <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Life Johnson</span> (1791) II. 219&nbsp;&nbsp; A mere antiquarian is a rugged being.</div>
There is no space here to lay out the affection and irritation driving a statement, which has at its source a fairly well known contretemps described in Boswell's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Life</span>, involving Thomas Percy, of the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Reliques of Ancient Poetry</span> (1765), and Thomas Pennant, author of <span xmlns="" class="titlem">A Tour of Scotland in 1769</span> (1771; see also Campbell, this volume). I cite the passage only as a beautiful balancing of the minimizing <em xmlns="">mere</em> with something more forceful, with a recognition of the ways in which "antiquarian" might describe an identity, not a mere practice, one in which we ought not to be surprised to find more uneven formations than those generally associated with the life of the mind.</p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>4</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It bears saying that it is not uncommon for us to despise that upon which we rely the most, and that the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Oxford English Dictionary</span> is itself a text always pushing away from its own antiquarian roots without being fully free of them&mdash;or at least not until fairly recently, when technology may well have automated and made dispassionate the process of rooting through vast amounts of material about which most people don't care. Still, what our dictionary reminds us, above all, is that when we say "Romantic Antiquarianism" we are not simply identifying a certain period in the long history of the field (profession, pursuit, or taste) of antiquarianism, so much as a crisis point in its development, one with important conceptual and emotional components.</p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>5</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The essays collected in this special issue suggest not only that, as Dr. Johnson proposed, "[a] <em xmlns="">mere antiquarian</em> is a rugged being," certainly able to survive my thoughtless characterization, but also that in the <em xmlns="">mere</em> nature of the category resides something of its power. Standing on the other side of analysis, antiquarianism always has a quality of passion-driven study, and therefore of embarrassment. It is the thing itself, absent the reason that comes to justify it. In that sense it may be seen as the id of history, the passionate element that must be controlled and limited if the field is to make its way in the world.
<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="#1">&nbsp;[1]</a><a name="back1">&nbsp;</a>
And yet, antiquarianism identifies the orientation that not only makes the objects of history matter at an affective level, but that also recognizes the force of the processes involved in coming to know that history. It is for this reason, or set of reasons, that this area of study is so fruitfully linked to the history of media or mediation in all of the articles in this issue. Indeed, several of the pieces testify to the embarrassment that is caused for a concept-driven field (or one that wishes to be conceptual), by too long a stop at the point of mediation. Whether the antiquarian surrounds himself with fakes or authentic objects, or&mdash;worse&mdash;with an undifferentiated combination of both, we wish he would want not to do so. We wish the antiquarian were gathering material in order to identify its status and make a claim about it, in order, in short, to answer the kinds of clear conceptual questions we like to believe motivate our own studies. It is embarrassing to think that heterogeneous and poorly-provenanced material is being assembled not in order to make an argument, but to create a home or even a self. Rosemary Hill's "The Antiquary at Home" is evocative in its treatment of two kinds of antiquarian self-fashioning, on the one hand the personal reinvention through interior decoration entailed in the antiquarian spaces created by Walter Scott and the French artist E. H. Langlois, and on the bold self-creation of the Sobieski Stuarts, about whose life-long performance the word "fraud" seems at once so reasonable and so impoverished. The home of Langlois (himself evidently a relic of an earlier era), which became Rouen's museum of antiquities even as he lived there with his family, and Abbotsford, the farmhouse that became a personal fantasy space that then contributed to the story Scott told of himself: the combination of vulnerability and performance involved in the creation and dissemination of these spaces does not find an easy resolution in the modern imagination. But then, as Hill indicates, Scott himself never fully resolved the public role of the space he built for himself, his own writing suggesting ambivalence and even embarrassment about publicizing Abbotsford.
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<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>6</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To recognize that an individual might organize his or her existence around things that are by our lights incoherent or inauthentic opens up questions that are always present in contemporary responses to Romantic antiquarianism: namely, what does it mean to call something coherent or authentic? Needless to say, the topics are of particular interest because modern accounts of the values of authenticity and coherence are directly traceable to Romantic forebears. The analyses of Campbell and Sachs are particularly interesting because of the ways their authors acknowledge their own uncertainty as to how best to respond to the heterogeneous or hybrid genres in which antiquarian material is typically relayed to the public. When Sachs describes "[t]he frustrations of a literary scholar trained to make certain kinds of arguments in response to certain genres of texts yet when confronted with a work that doesn't in any way conform to these generic models," he is addressing a feeling evident in many of the essays in this volume, as critics attempt to understand forms of knowledge distribution that we now know were fated to fail both as models and as modes of instruction because of the combined boldness and ignorance of their creators (Sachs 9). It makes the interpretative value of the frustration or shock all the richer when it is recognized as a phenomenon caused by the encounter of modern expectations with material not made to meet those expectations. In that sense the productive shock depends on the very drives that shape antiquarianism itself, on our own desire to find meaning in what might otherwise be so much indistinguishable debris from the past.
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<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>7</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Wood's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Ruins of Palmyra</span> (1753), the epochal volume addressed in Sachs's article, was an international success: it offered images that were adapted in verse, in the visual arts, and in architecture for decades to come, in England and abroad; its influence on Volney's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Ruines</span> (1791) and on its illustrations is quite open. The fact that the work was a blend of historical and literary speculation, travel memoir, and illustration evidently presented no problems of style, form, or decorum in its day. In a related vein, one suspects the miscellaneous quality of <span xmlns="" class="titlej">Bon Ton</span>, the periodical in which Timothy Campbell finds traces of Pennant's description of the guillotine, was the least of the challenges that racy rag presented to its original readers. When Campbell writes of <span xmlns="" class="titlej">Bon Ton</span>'s "dizzying mix of aesthetics, politics, sovereignty, sex, and costume," perhaps the most interesting question to ask is why and in what sense we find dizzying something that in its own day was close to conventional (Campbell 16). Campbell's account of the circulation of Pennant's description of the sources of the guillotine in Scottish culture compellingly demonstrates that authors and readers in earlier periods were notably more comfortable working with fragments than later critics have proved to be.</p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>8</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
What belongs in a newspaper or a magazine, we might ask, or on a website or a news channel? That the eighteenth-century found a new term for a published miscellany in "Magazine," a word originally meaning a space devoted to <em xmlns="">storage</em>, should serve to remind us just how much we tend to impose conceptual coherence on publications that are, in fact, always heterogeneous. Antiquarianism is about filling in a space between what you have discovered and what you know or believe to be the case. We are comfortable with some ways of filling those gaps, but less so with others. As I have begun to suggest, all of the essays in this issue are thoughtfully responsive to the challenge for the modern scholar of antiquarian form, and as such they open the door for us to think about the analytical force of our own discomforts. To this day a visitor to the Sir John Soane Museum in London finds a blend of what we might call authentic material (an Egyptian sarcophagus, and so on) and what we would be prone to call fakes (say casts of the Apollo Belvedere and other statues). The fact that Blake probably never saw the Portland Vase he illustrated for Darwin's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Botanic Garden</span> passed without comment in his own day, but it provokes discussion today. In that sense, the modern commitment to what we believe to be the unique evidentiary force of authentic monuments is far more complete than it ever was in the Romantic era. As Sam Smiles's piece thoughtfully demonstrates, it is worth dwelling on the nuanced nature of the making and reception of reproduction in the period. Smiles notes that "The antiquarian image . . . is best understood as a crystallization of cognitive assumptions about the object" (Smiles 13). Using distinctions drawn from the semiotics of Peirce, he suggests that even the most indexical mode of meaning-making in the illustration of antiquarian material always trends towards the symbolic: "I propose that antiquarian illustration can be classified for the most part as predominantly iconic but is often, despite the illustrator's best efforts, tilted towards the symbolic" (Smiles 8). I take this claim to imply that even the most apparently straightforward illustration, or the most concretely conceived reproductions (say a cast of a fragment of the Bayeux tapestry), offered in its day far more than information.</p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>9</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Lovers, children, and the founders of churches cling with special passion to simulacra and to objects made sacred by association. To encounter these materials from a standpoint outside the emotional universe in which they are prized is to become witness to something profound, atavistic, and frequently embarrassing. The passion of the connoisseur shares qualities with these kinds of affections, but adds a further confusion for the outside viewer. While relics or memorials will tend to be validated by their exclusive or limited nature, antiquarianism is characterized not by its commitment to the single and precious, but to the accumulation of multiple instances. One provisional description of Romantic antiquarianism might be that it is the sensibility of the cabinet of curiosities just at the rise of the age of museums. Hill's claim, in "Antiquary at Home," that "[p]ublic museums, university departments, and government bodies were taking over the territory that had been opened up by the antiquarianism of the previous two generations" is a little premature. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the public museums and university departments that could take over these territories were not yet in existence, though the sensibilities that would make them possible certainly were coming into being.
<a href="#2">&nbsp;[2]</a><a name="back2">&nbsp;</a> From the late eighteenth century forward, culture finds itself subjected to the pressure of ever increasing quantities of antiquities, and the problems they presented were not simply numerical but conceptual: the wide range of sources of antiquities was not liable to systematic organization. While the amount of material with which culture currently deals has evidently not lessened, what we have lost is the sense that any system might subsume all of the material that comes to hand. But, of course, not feeling one has a problem is not the same as not having a problem, and neither can be confused with having actually solved a problem. As these essays show, the interest of Romantic antiquarianism resides in its unresolved nature, the way in which projects in this era stand between an emerging scientific consensus and a number of more provisional strategies for arranging and diffusing knowledge that depend on or provoke an affective charge often denied or submerged in later approaches.</p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>10</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Aside from the modern embarrassment about a passion for the past insufficiently matured into conceptualization, another intriguing contradiction for the modern student is the play between classical and local sources of interest. Jonathan Sachs puts Wood's speculations on Homer of 1775 (<span xmlns="" class="titlem">An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer</span>, published in 1775, but circulated privately in 1767 and 1769) in relation to his earlier and, in many ways, more culturally resonant work on Palmyra of 1753. Sachs begins from the deceptively simple and openly retrospective question that might be crudely summarized as, Why Palmyra, given that it does not matter to us? But, as his essay demonstrates, the source of the mystery is the poverty of our own historical interests and (therefore) of our accounts of the passions and interests of earlier periods. When we see eighteenth-century antiquarians poring over provincial Roman work (of the sort to be found in Palmyra) for signs of classical achievement, or studying copies of vases, or even etchings of vases made from simulacra of vases, we may be tempted to identify a failure to care about the original. But to look at the matter from this point of view is to allow our own vision to be obscured by the haze of an aura which later eras (including our own) have projected around those parts of the past they have valued most. The modern relationship to the copy emerged after a slow and uneven process of intellectual refinement that took much of the nineteenth century to bring about. And so, when Erasmus Darwin needed an illustration of the Portland Vase for his <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Botanical Garden</span>, Blake produced a copy not from the original, but probably from a copy made by Wedgewood, and likely with some reference to some earlier engravings. Brylowe reviews the complex transmission of the Portland Vase, an excellent demonstration of the extent to which not seeing the thing in itself is in fact <em xmlns="">characteristic</em> of the period's relationship to art. In the process she also illustrates the sophisticated ways in which classical antiquities could be made to support nationalist aspirations. After all, it is Wedgewoods's achievement in pottery that provides the occasion for the treatment of the Vase in Darwin's poem.
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<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>11</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sachs astutely identifies the suggestion in Wood "that one needs to visit the remains of classical civilization if one is ever to understand the writings they produced" (Sachs 18) as putting into question a long tradition (still in a way current) of understanding the Classics as universal texts&mdash;infinitely amenable to comprehension no matter the circumstances. While this observation is entirely true from a modern point of view, it is far less clear how much this contradiction could have been recognized as such in its own day. Gibbon described Wood and Dawkins as having transported the ruins of Palmyra and Balbec to England, which seems so absurd a notion to us that it might makes us reflect on the history of mediation itself. What makes something feel accessible by culture? The step taken by one individual onto lunar soil may conceivably be described as a "giant leap for mankind." And yet, to this day only around a dozen people have actually disturbed the dusty surface of the moon. The emergence of photographs of the earth seen in its entirety, a small side-benefit of the space program, was an epochal event in its own way, one celebrated by the placement of one of those photographs on the cover of <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Whole Earth Catalogue</span>, an attempt to suggest that the whole world was available to be known, and even that a sense of the whole was a vital political development. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Google Earth</span>, on the other hand, which appears to make every corner of our planet available in detail, for that very reason risks making the world feel utterly inconceivable as a whole. There is, in short, a power in partial knowledge. </p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>12</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Many of the essays capture the ways in which visual representations, even those apparently intended to capture monuments with accuracy, come to be valorized by the romance they manage to project. Myrone is particularly interesting on the double challenge of antiquarianism not just before its concerns were taken over by more scientific fields, but when it could still imagine itself as having a role in the popular imagination. Writing on the overlap in prejudices about topography and about antiquarians, he captures nicely the ways in which John Britton saw his own scholarly researches to have been motivated by an original fascination with the mystery of the location suggested by some of the more speculative explanations on the topic, writing of Avebury that "[t]he mystic halo which enveloped it, tended rather to awaken than repress research" (Myrone 9). </p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>13</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Among the particular strengths on which Romantic antiquarians could build was the long tradition of antiquarianism itself. In that sense, antiquarianism was <em xmlns="">not</em> born from the French Revolution, though it was fated to be utterly changed by a number of developments we associate with that world-historical phenomenon. The intellectual and institutional relationship between the violence of the Revolution and the emergence of Gothic taste is well established.<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="#3">&nbsp;[3]</a><a name="back3">&nbsp;</a> The figure of Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois, the artist living in the ruined building that became a museum discussed by Hill, himself a kind of relic of the Ancien R&eacute;gime, is just one colorful instance of the ways in which historical trauma made it possible to see fragments as at once belonging to a lost past and as intimately connected to one's own culture. To witness the creation of significant ruins, to participate in the cultural dislocations entailed in the revolution and its aftermath&mdash;these were both lived experiences shaping the nostalgia typical of the post-revolutionary historical sensibility. (Bann 19-22). And then, the emergence of a mass audience for material that had been the preoccupation of a widespread but relatively small group often devoted to fairly obscure researches was bound to affect the mediation and reception of a field. This is a topic laid out with sophistication and nuance in all of the pieces in this collection, but which Ina Ferris addresses most directly in her account of the ways in which Romantic antiquarians "increasingly turned into public authors" (Ferris 2). Topographers, sublime painters, wood engravers, popular compilers: these offered so many formal modalities for representing the knowledge of antiquarian material to a broader public. And, while the drives to reach out are directly connected to the emergence of more specialized fields such as a more technical history, or archeology, the developments have neither congruent aims nor analogous outcomes. We may remember here the great failure of antiquarianism in British letters, that of Edward Casaubon and his fruitless search for the key to all mythologies, described in the most important attempt to capture in a novel the period just before the coming of the first Reform Bill and the trend towards a vastly enfranchised public which it inaugurated. And <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Middlemarch</span> is more than satiric in its treatment of the challenge of antiquity, of course, featuring&mdash;in its representation of Dorothea in Rome&mdash;one of the most poignant representations of the crisis liable to be provoked by the unmediated encounter with the past. </p>
<p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class=" "><strong>14</strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At its heart, the antiquarian project is based on the unbridgeable gap we know to divide the past from the present. We may trace the embarrassment antiquarianism sometimes provokes not only to the inevitable failures of all attempts to understand intimately a lost era, but more compellingly to the insight these failures give us into the drives that motivate such attempts in the first place. If the modern tendency has been to fill in the space between a lost past and an uncertain present with what is often thought of as disinterested scientific research, this does not mean we have moved beyond the fundamental challenges motivating earlier attempts to overcome the gap. As these papers illustrate so splendidly, Romantic antiquarianism&mdash;because of its position at the point of transition between the speculative regimen of an earlier era and the emergence of the period of licensed scientific research and accreditation we still inhabit&mdash;provides a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the passions underlying all desires to know, and on the gains and losses entailed in the emergence of a dispassionate new scholarship. </p>
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<div class="citations" id="body.1_div.1_div.2"><h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<div type="listBibl"><p class="hang">
"antiquary, adj. and n."
<span xmlns="" class="titlem"><a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="link_ref" href="http://www.oed.com/" title="OED Online">OED Online</a></span>. Web.
23 May 2014.</p><p class="hang">
"antiˈquarianism, n."
<span xmlns="" class="titlem"><a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="link_ref" href="http://www.oed.com/" title="OED Online">OED Online</a></span>. Web.
23 May 2014.</p><p class="hang">Bann, Stephen. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print.
</p><p class="hang">Louis, Fran&ccedil;ois, and Peter Miller. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800</span>. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. Print.
</p><p class="hang">Miller, Peter. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences</span>. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print.
</p><p class="hang">
Momigliano, Analdo.
"Ancient History and the Antiquarian."
<span xmlns="" class="titlej">Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes</span> 13
(1950): 285-315. Print.
</p><p class="hang">Siegel, Jonah. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art</span>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.
</p><p class="hang">Siegel, Jonah. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Emergence of the Modern Museum</span>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
</p></div>
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<div class="notes"><div class="noteHeading"><h3>Notes</h3></div><div class="note"><p class="letnote"><a name="1">[1] </a>
For a seminal account of the relationship between history and antiquarianism see Analdo Momigliano's "Ancient History and the Antiquarian." Pioneering recent work on the long history of antiquarianism and its cultural implications includes Peter Miller's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences</span> and Fran&ccedil;ois Louis's and Peter Miller's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800</span>.
<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="#back1">BACK</a></p></div><div class="note"><p class="letnote"><a name="2">[2] </a>The development of the nation's premier museum of antiquities is worth citing to illustrate the slow development of institutions. Though the British Museum was founded in 1753, its collection of antiquities was modest, and access was difficult for most of the eighteenth century. The Department of Antiquities expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, after its foundation in 1807, and went through various administrative vicissitudes. In 1860, it was divided into three new departments: Greek and Roman Antiquities, Coins and Medals, and Oriental Antiquities. The Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography was only established 1866. (The Mus&eacute;e National du Moyen Age [or Mus&eacute;e Cluny] had been founded in Paris in 1843.) On the development of the museum in the period, see my <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Emergence of the Modern Museum.</span> University Departments were even slower to emerge in the fields that took over from antiquarianism.
<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="#back2">BACK</a></p></div><div class="note"><p class="letnote"><a name="3">[3] </a>
A useful source on the topic and its broader context is Stephen Bann's <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France</span>.
<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="#back3">BACK</a></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/siegel-jonah">Siegel, Jonah</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1016" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">antiquarianism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/definitions" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">definitions</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/embarrassment" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">embarrassment</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/visual" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">visual</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1775" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">modern</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/857" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">historicism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/past" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">past</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/present" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">present</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-xml-tei field-type-link-field field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">XML:TEI:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/imported/praxis/antiquarianism/praxis.antiquarianism.2014.siegel.xml" target="_blank" class="teiButton">XML : TEI</a></div></div></section>Fri, 25 Apr 2014 14:33:00 +0000rc-admin52184 at http://www.rc.umd.eduCrocco, "The Ruins of Empire: Nationalism, Art, and Empire in Hemans's Modern Greece"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/patriotism/crocco/crocco.html
<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/patriotism/index.html">Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
<div align="center">
<h2>Romanticism and Patriotism:<br />
Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">The Ruins of Empire:
Nationalism, Art, and Empire in<br />
Hemans's <em>Modern Greece</em></h3>
<h4 align="center">Francesco Crocco, Graduate Center,
City University of New York</h4>
</div>
<div id="content">
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Nothing beside remains. Round the decay<br />
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare<br />
The lone and level sands strech far away<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&mdash;Percy
Bysshe Shelley <a href=
"#note1">[1]</a>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
</p>Such
dim-conceived glories of the brain<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring round the heart an
undescribable feud,<br />
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;That mingles Grecian grandeur with
the rude<br />
Wasting of the old time&mdash;with a billowy
main&mdash;<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A sun&mdash;a shadow of a
magnitude.<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&mdash;John
Keats <a href=
"#note2">[2]</a>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<ol>
<li>
<p>At the conclusion of his magisterial history,
<em>The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,</em>
Edward Gibbon confesses, "It was among the ruins of the
Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which
has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life"
(II.642-3). Over a decade later and across the channel,
C.F. Volney would write <em>The Ruins or Meditations on
the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of Nature,</em>
a text which gained instant popularity among select
British reading circles. The invocation to the text
echoes Gibbon's sentiment by hailing those sublime and
"solitary ruins, holy sepulchers and silent walls" (1),
which, while traveling "in the Ottoman dominions, and
through those provinces which were anciently the
kingdoms of Egypt and Syria" (3) inspired his plan for
a philosophical reverie on the causes of the decline
and fall of empires. These texts illustrate the depth
of interest in relics, ruins, and antiquities that
prevailed among late eighteenth- and early
ninteenth-century British culture, fed as it were by
the parallel developments of Ossianic nation-making and
imperial travel narratives. They also establish a
unique rhetoric and paradigm of the cyclical decline
and fall of empire that will inform later nationalist
texts.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The literature of the long eighteenth century
reflects an uneasiness about the pursuit of empire in
the trope of ruins. Proceeding from eighteenth century
antiquarianism, the literature of ruins converted the
congeries of ruins, relics, and forgeries into
artifacts that naturalized and codified a cohesive
British identity and continuity of community. <a href=
"#note3">[3]</a>
But the ruin also performed a separate and sometimes
subversive function as a symbol for the historical
process of the rise and decline of nations. This
hermeneutic diverges into two distinct but related
traditions in the eighteenth century. Whereas Gibbon's
<em>Decline</em> expresses the classical ruin
sentiment, which mourns the inevitable decline of
empire, in the eighteenth-century this sentiment adopts
a different tone&mdash;that of the prophet's scorn for
the self-destructive pursuit of power and worldly
splendor most poignantly expressed in Volney's
<em>Ruins</em>. <a href=
"#note4">[4]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Nestled between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and
the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the figurative landscape
of British Romantic poetry is frequently littered with
ruins. In Romanticism, the ruin motif is expressed and
interpreted in various ways; here the literal ruin or
monument, there the figurative ruin of the self, and
elsewhere still the formalistic ruin of the Romantic
fragment poem, with all of its unsettled meaning.
<a href=
"#note5">[5]</a>
Among other readings, this study proposes that the
literal ruin is politically overdetermined as a motif
in Romantic poetry, possessing an acute political
currency in a stormy period characterized by war,
transience, and political extremes. Bruce Haley has
argued that when Romantics write about ruins and
monuments, they act "to restore damaged, faded, or
unfamiliar figures to the status of living
forms"&mdash;forms that can express meaning (5).
Because there is an essential anxiety that the ruin or
monument, as a record, fails to express its
<em>idea</em> or even the characteristics of its
central figure without the aid of an interpretive
apparatus often consisting of adjoining visual forms
and inscriptions, the monument poem must recover the
muted and dead form of the central figure and make it
live and speak again (3). However, this imagines that
the poet can imaginatively recreate the cultural and
ideological matrix that once determined meaning for the
figure, a kind of Romantic archeology. My contention is
that rather than <em>restore</em> meaning, the poet
<em>refurbishes</em> meaning using contemporary
ideological materiel. The monument poem breathes life
into a dead form so that it may speak to a contemporary
audience. Furthermore, the message is mediated in
transmission and reception, and is thus subject to a
host of aesthetic, cultural, historical, and
ideological forces. For instance, if we take Shelley's
<em>Ozymandias</em> (1818) and Keats' <em>On Seeing the
Elgin Marbles</em> (1817) and reread these poems from
within this hermeneutic they do not appear as
restorations at all. Hence, when Shelley recovers the
figure of Ozymandias, it is not his leadership and
omnipotence that is conveyed by the poem's
interpretative apparatus, which would have been the
intention of the record, but rather his cruelty and the
transience of empire (which admittedly may have been
how it was originally received). Likewise, Keats takes
the Elgin Marbles not as evidence of everlasting
Grecian grandeur, but as symbols of the inevitable
decay wrought by time. The refurbishing of meaning that
occurs in these poems, as I stated above, is
overdetermined by the political unconscious of a less
sanguine age, where the drive for insatiable power and
grandeur appear as deadly hubris. Ultimately, these
poems are mediated by historical, cultural, and
ideological transactions that place them within a
broader national and international conversation over
the direction of national politics, the arc of imperial
desire, and the anxiety generated by these overlapping
vectors, an anxiety frequently troped as ruin.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Proceeding from this methodological stance, this
study will discuss the importance of the trope of ruins
and the paradigm of decline and fall to the rhetoric of
nationalism and imperialism in Felicia Hemans's
<em>Modern Greece</em> (1817)<em>.</em> In the poem,
Hemans adopts a historicist narrative position
reminiscent of Gibbon and Volney, replete with
"objective" detachment, episodic flashbacks,
sentimentalism, and magniloquent conclusions. Yet,
contrary to the republican commonplace that nation and
empire are ultimately incompatible, Hemans draws the
opposite conclusion: Western nation-making and
imperialism are <em>interdependent</em> . But this
contention is made conditional upon the active
participation of women in patriotic discourse. Through
the discourse of (uncritical) patriotism, a site where
women could in fact make their presence felt during her
time, Hemans sought to broaden the role of women in
political and public English life, and would herself
become widely hailed as a model of domestic patriotism.
In <em>Modern Greece,</em> which is an adaptation of
the conventionally masculine travelogue genre, she is
sensitive to the hazards of this project, employing
innovative generic modes and narratological structures
to manage the public fallout of gender-based discursive
transgressions. Once accessible by this stage work, the
poem can then specifically accomplish the broadening of
the role of contemporary women by arguing that the fall
of ancient Greece occurred because of the failed
education of its youth, itself a consequence of
restricting the influence of Greece's mothers in Greek
civil society. In making this argument, Hemans actively
disputes the view that Greece's national decline was
fated because of its imperialist designs, thereby
restoring the link between nation-making and empire
that Gibbon, Volney, and a tradition of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century texts had warned against.
Instead, she issues her own equally apocalyptic warning
to the nation: if Britain is to avoid Greece's tragic
but avertable fate, it must find a place for patriotic
women to speak and write in the public sphere.</p>
<p><strong>I. Nation and Empire in British
Self-Construction</strong></p>
</li>
<li>The centrality of empire to the constitution of
British identity is by now fairly well established.
Picking up from Renan's claim that forgetting is a
crucial factor in the creation of a nation (45), and
Anderson's claim that a nation is above all an "imagined
community," Linda Colley has argued that Britishness was
quite literally "forged" from conflicting and internally
fractious Scottish, Welsh, English, and Irish
communities&mdash;not primarily through political Acts of
Union (1707 &amp; 1801), but through the mechanism of
othering. Colley argues that Britain was "an invention
forged above all by war." She continues,
<blockquote>
<p>They [the British] defined themselves as
Protestants struggling for survival against the
world's foremost Catholic power. They defined
themselves against the French as they imagined them
to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent and
unfree. And, increasingly as the wars went on, they
defined themselves in contrast to the colonial
peoples they conquered, peoples who were manifestly
alien in terms of culture, religion and colour.
(<em>Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701-1837</em>
5)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Conflicting class and ethnic interests could only be
successfully negotiated and subsumed within a
constructed British sodality by their hostile alterity
to various others defined in national, religious, or
racial terms.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This raises two questions. How long can a nation
maintain such specious and tenuous commonalities after
the war is over and the empire is lost? And is there a
greater danger of incessant warfare and unbridled
expansionism consuming and corrupting the very essence
of the nation? Many cultural historians have spent a
good deal of time studying the trauma inflicted upon
British national identity in its post-imperial phase,
particularly as fears mount about the fragmentation of
Britain in a federated European Union. <a href=
"#note6">[6]</a>
For now, I only wish to pause on this subject in order
to point up the dialectic of nation and empire
intrinsic to the modern British nation-state before I
move from this observation to the latter question. If
imperialism, in all its many permutations, helped forge
a nation, could it also lead to its ruination? It seems
to me that at the heart of Gibbon and Volney's texts is
a fundamental assurance of this fact.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Not surprisingly, in British literature of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we often discover a
troubling conflation of imperial discourse with
nationalist rhetoric, particularly since Thomson's
patriotic "Ode: Rule, Britannia" first articulated a
pattern of providential national election and
commercial/colonial supremacy which confirmed the
centrality of the artist to the project of national
invention. <a href=
"#note7">[7]</a>
Thomson's claim dovetails with the sanguinary
disposition of 18<sup>th</sup> -century political
economists towards the rise of a capitalist society.
Bernard Mandeville's <em>Fable of the Bees</em>
elaborates a commercialist stance which defends the
extremes of "private vice" or self-interest as the
vehicle for ensuring the common good, despite the
ostensible contradiction with conventional morality.
<a href=
"#note8">[8]</a>
Mandeville's argument presages Smith's more developed
analysis of mercantile capitalism, with its serene
faith in the benevolent and invisible hand of the free
market to produce utopian conditions. <a href=
"#note9">[9]</a>
Both understood that the untrammeled freedoms of the
market, when hitched to a compliant "fiscal-military
state" <a href=
"#note10">[10]</a>
would and did lead to expansionist tendencies. Hence,
like Thompson, both countenanced imperial expansion as
the necessary outcome of a prosperous and free
commercial society.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>But where Thomson, like Mandeville and Smith, is
unequivocally in favor of commerce and empire as the
twin springs of Britain's liberty and prosperity, other
interlocutors in this conversation weren't so sure.
Cowper and Goldsmith expressed anxiety about the
compatibility of progress, commerce and empire. Hume
warned that overrefinement, which is born of excessive
luxury, is the most extreme danger to taste and
national sensibility. <a href=
"#note11">[11]</a>
Gibbon attributed the decline of Rome to the perils of
imperial expansion. <a href=
"#note12">[12]</a>
And Malthus, portending Marx, would later question the
wisdom of placing trust in market forces to serve the
public good.<a href=
"#note13">[13]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The belief in the fundamental incompatibility
between a prosperous republican state and a powerful
imperial state has a classical provenance. David
Armitage has traced this discourse back to the Roman
historian Sallust, who argued that the Roman Republic's
thirst for glory eventually led to cultural decline and
the loss of republican freedoms under the dictatorship
of the caesars (<em>The Ideological Origins of the
British Empire</em> 126-27). The Sallustian tradition,
which poses an irreconciliable relationship between
republican liberty and empire, informs Machiavelli's
<em>Discorsi,</em> where he too remarks on the dilemma
of sustaining liberty or pursuing imperial greatness or
<em>grandezza</em>. Armitage locates this tension at
the very beginning of the English Republic, during the
years of the commonwealth. Milton, he argues, perceived
the crisis and failure of the commonwealth in precisely
these terms as the Rump Parliament gave way to a
Cromwellian Protectorate, evaporating political liberty
in the wake of a Sulla-like military dictatorship that
hastily pursued expansionist commercial policies
(134-6).</p>
<p><strong>II. Women and Patriotism in British Romantic
Literature</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>From Milton to the Romantics&mdash;who witnessed a
similar period of revolution, empire, and colonial
expansion&mdash;there is a continuous theme of
patriotic discourse and imperial anxiety underlying
much of British literature. Many authors, particularly
female authors, entered the literary milieu by
intervening in this conversation, precisely because
patriotism was such a convenient front for eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century women to enter the literary
public sphere. Since the woman's purview is primarily
concerned with domesticity and private relations, it is
within reason to expect that women should want to be
concerned with the preservation of the nation (often
gendered female as in the case of "Britannia"), which
is the guarantor of this private sphere. Hence, as
female patriots increasingly stake out a civic role in
support of their male compatriots, concern for the
nation, especially one like Britain that was defined by
intermittent warfare, supersedes the doctrine of
separate sexual spheres (Colley 261). And who better to
assume the domestic guardianship of the nation than
those women entrusted with the reproduction and
transmission of its bodies, values, and
subjectivities?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The popular conception of female moral authority,
rooted in the domestic roles of child-rearing and
education, converted the female desire for civic
participation into a <em>duty</em> to act and often to
write.<a href=
"#note14">[14]</a>
Female writers sometimes translated this duty into
conservative reform initiatives to discipline the
laboring class, as with Hannah More's tracts; or
conversely into liberal or radical reform initiatives,
such as Wollstonecraftian feminism or abolitionism.
<a href=
"#note15">[15]</a>
As Anne Mellor has suggested, female writers were also
expected to embody Christian virtue, adding piety to
patriotism. <a href=
"#note16">[16]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Yet, if writing were a duty, it was also a form of
dissension against the increasingly strict mandates of
a society of separate spheres. <a href=
"#note17">[17]</a>
In a growing print culture where the status of the
"literary lady" as a feminine icon contributed to the
marketability of female texts, the viability of a woman
writer's career often depended upon the strategy
selected to manage the public fallout of this
transgression. <a href=
"#note18">[18]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In light of this, Felicia Hemans's prodigious
authorial career, extending through nineteen volumes of
poetry and two dramas from the publication of
<em>England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism</em>
(1808) to the second edition of <em>Songs of the
Affections</em> (1835), exhibits perhaps the most
successful attempt at self-definition as a "literary
lady," but one which also manifests a patriotic role.
Indeed, her status as "England's most famous female
patriotic poet" <a href=
"#note19">[19]</a>
garnered her a place in the British canon for over a
century. What Victorian schoolchild could forget the
famous verses of <em>Casabianca,</em> <em>Homes of
England,</em> or <em>England's Dead</em>? So successful
was she at trademarking an orthodox image of domestic
femininity that she outsold almost all of her male and
female competitors in the literary marketplace, and
this during a period of reaction and war.<a href=
"#note20">[20]</a>
Her contemporary reviewers and Victorian biographers
would proceed to relish the delicacy and refinement of
her feminine traits. The <em>Edinburgh Monthly
Review</em> raved that Mrs. Hemans "never ceases to be
strictly <em>feminine</em> in the whole current of her
thought and feeling."<a href=
"#note21">[21]</a>
Francis Jeffries, writing for the <em>Edinburgh
Review,</em> summed up her poetry as "a fine
exemplification of Female Poetry." <a href=
"#note22">[22]</a>
This sentiment is corroborated by her biographer, Henry
F. Chorley, in his <em>Memorials,</em> who tells us
that her letters "give so fair a picture of her mind in
all its <em>womanliness</em> " and approvingly cites
one critic who swears that her poems "could not have
been written by a man" (112-13).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>However, modern critics have examined the reality fo
teh failed marriage and disregard for domestic matters
that characterized Hemans's life behind her traditional
reprsentation as a paragon of womanly virtue.<a href=
"#note23">[23]</a>
Felicia Hemans, ne&eacute; Felicia Dorothea Browne, was
born in Liverpool in 1793 to a middle-class family of
six children. In 1808, after her father abandoned the
family, they moved to Bronwylfa in Wales and Felicia
began writing poetry for publication to defray
household expenses. In 1812, she married Captain
Hemans, moved to Daventry, and conceived the first of
five children&mdash;all boys. Suddenly, in 1818, her
husband left for Italy and never returned, leaving her
pregnant with their last son and bereft of sufficient
income to care for their children. It is at this point
that Hemans moved back in with her mother, older
brother, and sister who effectively raised her children
while she devoted herself to full-time writing&mdash;at
least until her mothers death in 1827. Of this period,
Chorley writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[The] peculiar circumstances of [her] position,
which, by placing her in a household, as a member and
not as its head, excused her from many of those small
cares of domestic life, which might have either
fretted away her day-dreams, and, by interruption,
have made of less avail the search for knowledge to
which she bent herself with such eagerness; or, more
probably still, might have imparted to her poetry
more of masculine health and stamen, at the expense
of some of its romance and music. (I.35-6)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To allay potential criticism of Hemans, Chorley
cleverly converts Hemans's shirking of the prescribed
domestic role into a positive good for the production
of a feminine poetry sans the adulteration of a
"masculine health" that would have been imparted to it,
ironically, by the rigors and interruptions of domestic
labor. This apologia points up the work of literary
fabrication that went on behind Hemans's proscenium of
domestic femininity throughout much of her adult life.
Ultimately, after a lifetime of disappointments by male
providers and being early thrown into the competitive
literary market to eke out a living for herself and her
family, the trauma of her mother's death precipitated
the onset of physical decline that eventually leds to
her early death at the age of 41 in 1835.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Because her writing came as a result of financial
necessity, considerations of pubic taste frequently
impinged upon her selection of topoi and style to
ensure commercial success. <a href=
"#note24">[24]</a>
<em>England &amp; Spain</em> (1808), her first
published poem, was calculated to exploit contemporary
interest in the continental war. Likewise, <em>The
Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy</em> (1816), a
work that sealed her literary fame, exploited popular
contempt for Napoleon's plundering of Italian and Roman
art. In the case of <em>Modern Greece</em> (1817) we
know from a correspondence with her publisher, John
Murray, that she chose the topic in order to exploit
the nationwide scandal ensuing from the importation of
the Elgin Marbles, and, moreover, that because of its
academic style she thought it circumspect to publish
the poem anonymously to increase its salability.
<a href=
"#note25">[25]</a></p>
<p><strong>III. Ruins and Empire in <em>Modern
Greece</em></strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In <em>Modern Greece</em>, one finds a peculiar
sentimentalism towards the quest for imperial
<em>grandezza</em>. Perhaps deliberately, the poem
takes off from the success of Byron's <em>Childe
Harold</em> in content and form. Like <em>Childe
Harold</em>, it utilizes the rich features of the
travelogue genre and engages the simmering debate over
the Elgin Marbles. It also shares a similar stanzaic
structure, notational apparatus, and episodic form. But
here the similarities end. The poem's contiguous 101
stanzas reveal a non-chronological episodic structure
with multiple rhetorical modes. It begins ostensibly in
the present with a sublimely picturesque Grecian
landscape colored by wild vegetation and moldering
ruins. The narrator guides us through this scene by
following the meandering path of a wandering
<em>enthusiast</em> &mdash;ostensibly a western
traveler captivated by ancient Greece. We move from
this to the tragic account of a Grecian
&eacute;migr&eacute; in the Americas, reflecting on the
phenomenology of the refugee who has lost his homeland.
From here, the poem shifts into a specious historicity,
narrating the fall of classical Greece (and conflating
this with the decline of the Byzantine Empire) on the
very morning "When Asia poured / Her fierce fanatics to
Byzantium 's wall" (XXXVI). From this re-enactment, the
poem turns back to the present to magnify the contrast
between past glory and present ruin. It then concludes
by shifting into prophecy, reclaiming Greek heritage
(manifested in the expropriation of the Elgin Marbles)
for an emergent British imperium and striking a
potentially jarring final note with a disturbing vision
of Britain's future ruins. This vision is reminiscent
of Volney's sentiment in <em>The Ruins</em>, where the
narrator witnesses the ruination of past civilizations
and ponders whether one day a traveler like himself
might also sit silently amidst the ruins of Europe and
"weep in solitude over the ashes of their inhabitants,
and the memory of their former greatness" (8). <a href=
"#note26">[26]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Central to the poem's machinery of anonymity is its
sophisticated notational apparatus, whose erudition
fooled one reviewer into believing that the poem could
not have been the work of a "female pen" and must
certainly be the production of an ostensibly male
"academical pen." <a href=
"#note27">[27]</a>
Furthermore, the notes are freighted with frequent
citations of Gibbon's <em>Decline and Fall</em>, and
the poem's subject matter clearly betrays a line of
influence to this text as well. <a href=
"#note28">[28]</a>
In fact, Peter Trinder's biography states that this was
one of Hemans's favorite books. <a href=
"#note29">[29]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Trinder also reveals that Hemans "spent much of her
[childhood] time lingering and reading in the ruins of
the castle [Conway]," indicating a fascination with
place and romantic ruins. This corresponds with her
description of the Grecian landscape as "the ruin Time
and Fate have wrought" (XXX). Just as she would steal
off to the ruins of Conway Castle to suffuse her
imagination with sublime thoughts as she read, so too
she constructs modern Greece as a vast and desolate
wasteland of tombs and monuments for the wandering
enthusiast to stray and seek inspiration. It is a
"Realm of sad beauty . . . a shrine / That Fancy visits
with Devotion's zeal, / To catch high thoughts and
impulses divine . . . Amidst the tombs of heroes"
(XXI).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>There are two observations that need to be made
here. The first has to do with Hemans's creative
destruction of contemporary Greek culture and society.
Hemans orientalizes modern Greece by reducing its
territory to a vast wilderness of "savage cliffs and
solitudes" (XLIX) that is ready for European colonial
intervention in the guise of a wandering enthusiast.
<a href=
"#note30">[30]</a>
Through a clever temporal disjuncture that posits a
radical and unmediated cultural dislocation between
past and present, she is able to reconcile this
orientalized image of modern Greece with a concomitant
Hellenic revival that contrarily depicts Greece as the
cradle of Western civilization. Greece <em>was</em>
part and provenance of the constellation of western
civilization; its ruins signify this former identity.
But now, we are told, these ruins litter a territory
inhabited by another culture, dubiously "Greek," but
bearing no connection to the land's past inhabitants.
In fact, the only thing these cultures share in common
is a geographic coordinate. Interestingly, Greece's
geographical location, on the metaphoric borderline
between East (Levant) and West (Europe), sustains such
a condition of categorical confusion. These factors
fertilize the orientalist imaginary in which modern
Greece is transformed into a sublime sepulcher of
tombs, ruins, and silent plains where all is "silence
round, and solitude, and death" (XXXII). It is easy
thus to imagine the modern Greeks as belonging to a
debased "second race" who "inherit but their name" and
for whom "No patriot feeling binds them to the soil . .
. Their glance is cold indifference, and their toil /
but to destroy what ages have revered" (LXXXVII). The
specter of cultural miscegenation is duly exorcized by
insisting that this "second race" is really the progeny
of an invading "Crescent horde" whose Moslem regions
are "to intellect a desert space, / A wild without a
fountain or a flower, / Where towers Oppression
&lsquo;midst the deepening glooms." The vast chasm
separating this "second race" from the ancient Hellenes
is glibly denoted by the use of the modifier "modern"
in the title <em>Modern Greece</em>. The phrase is
presented as an oxymoron, because we are led to believe
that there is nothing really modern about them.
<a href="#note31">
[31]</a> Instead, they appear wholly the production of
an expansionist, despotic, and conventionally oriental
culture that has plundered and destroyed the ancient
glories of Hellenic Greece; exterminated or exiled its
people; annexed its territories to the landscape of the
oriental sublime; and, tragically for the "civilized"
West, subjected the cradle of culture itself to a
primitive regime of barbarism. <a href=
"#note32">[32]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This narrative tour-de-force legitimates
intervention by Western forces, who are figured as the
proper heirs and descendants of that "nobler race" now
displaced by a "second race" which lacks the intellect
and sensibility to appreciate the Grecian legacy.
Gibbon provides the sub-text for this passage when he
cites Petrarch's astonishment at the "supine
indifference" of the modern Romans towards the
stupendous monuments and ruins of ancient Rome, and who
marvels that a "stranger of the Rhone was more
conversant with these antiquities than the nobles and
natives of the metropolis" (II.638). Gibbon viewed
himself as just such a stranger, characterizing himself
as a "devout pilgrim from the remote and once savage
countries of the North" who has now returned to the
cradle of western civilization to pay homage and
resurrect its glories (II.641-2).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This takes us to a second point, for if the "savage"
natives cannot appreciate the relics and ruins of a
fallen empire, then it behooves the "civilized" nations
to send their own archeological teams to recover this
history for the presumed benefit of humanity. True to
the orientalist mold, Hemans's <em>Modern Greece</em>
posits that Hellenic Greece's ruins can be
metaphorically read, appreciated, and understood only
by an enthusiast possessed of an equivalently western
sensibility. <a href=
"#note33">[33]</a>
Like Gibbon, Hemans offers us a pilgrimmatic
figure&mdash;a "wandering son of other
lands"&mdash;possessed of a remarkably British
temperament. I would argue that Hemans's enthusiast is
a specimen of British Romantic sensibility. Our
narrator, who functions as a guide and chronicler,
describes our wandering enthusiast who traverses the
vast solitudes and sublime ruins of modern Greece as
one "whose enthusiast mind / Each muse of ancient days
hath deep imbued / With lofty lore, and all his
thoughts refined / In the calm school of silent
solitude" (III). We have here the quintessential
Wordsworthian traveler "fostered alike by beauty and by
fear," who exhibits a penchant for introspection and a
profound sensitivity to one's natural surroundings.
This traveler is distinguished from the modern Greek in
every way that matters. In fact, the only character
similar in disposition and sensibility to our
peripatetic protagonist is the figure of the exiled
Greek, who is also portrayed as possessing a Romantic
demeanor as he traverses the North American wilds.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We must pause here and note that this
characteristically British Romantic traveler operates
within the narrative in a manner similar to that of
Mary Louise Pratt's "sentimental narrator" of
contemporary travel narratives who feigns innocence and
vulnerability while performing the interior exploration
of native lands slated for expropriation, exploitation,
and colonization. <a href=
"#note34">[34]</a>
In this sense, our restless Romantic enthusiast is also
an imperialist agent, culturally expropriating Grecian
territory and artifacts based on a presumed commonality
of sensibility and shared historical experience of
imperial and civilizational <em>grandezza</em>. When we
consider this in conjunction with the fact that
Hemans's text also comes equipped with a panoply of
ethnographic and topographical notes that subject
Greece to a scrupulous investigation by Western
academics, we can begin to see the various layers of
cultural appropriation that operate within the text.
Ultimately, Hemans's poem displaces and
deterritorializes the modern Greeks, offering instead a
genealogy in which the modern Briton, who is presented
as the Romantic antithesis of the savage modern Greek,
becomes the legitimate heir to Hellenic Greece. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in the mirroring of the
modern Briton in the Romantic figure of the exiled
Greek.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The British cooptation of a Grecian national
heritage is further impelled by the act of mourning
over its demise. In "Hemans and Home" Tricia Lootens
has explored the complicity of mourning with
nation-building in Hemans's poems. Heroes' graves bind
national folk communities, and the work of the female
poet is to memorialize these graves and thus impress
them into the national imaginary as sentimental
signposts of a shared national experience of loss
(247). In addition, as in the case of <em>England's
Dead,</em> these graves are often found spread across
the empire, thus working to assimilate settler
communities into a nationalist framework and thereby
further legitimate expansionary imperialist polices.
<a href=
"#note35">[35]</a>
In <em>Modern Greece,</em> we see the psychological
annexation of Greece to a "Greater" Britain through the
sentimental act of mourning for a supposedly long dead
people whose territory remains a vast sepulcher which
only the British romantic subject, as cultural heir to
Grecian antiquity, is properly equipped to
appreciate.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Hemans's choice of narratology is remarkable because
it raises the gendered politics of the travelogue
genre. Hemans's decision to publish the poem
anonymously suggests a profound sensitivity to the
gendered exclusivity of the travel narrative with its
rigorous academic style and apotheosis of masculine
mobility and independence. <a href=
"#note36">[36]</a>
To make it accessible to women authors writing within a
discourse of patriotic inclusion, she finds it
expedient to tamper with the conventions of the genre
by retrofitting it with an overtly patriotic rhetoric
and value, insinuating that she understood full well
the consequences of unmitigated generic transgression.
By resituating this generic form within the discursive
horizon of patriotic texts, Hemans was quite
deliberately fashioning a strategy whereby a "female
pen" could experiment with a conventionally masculine
genre without fear of reprisal.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The poem's narratological structure elaborates this
strategy. Unlike Byron, who eventually outs himself as
the protagonist of his travel narrative <em>Childe
Harold</em>, Hemans cannot claim firsthand knowledge of
Greece and must instead operate behind the invented
persona of a Romantic enthusiast. I would argue that
this ploy bespeaks Hemans's awareness of the severe
limitations placed on women's geographical mobility in
the early nineteenth-century. In light of this, Byron's
hasty denunciation of the poem as "good for nothing;
written by some one who has never been there" <a href=
"#note37">[37]</a>
comes off as a callously insensitive remark that
carelessly overlooks the reality of immobility faced by
middle-class women like Hemans. One way around this sad
reality is to construct a protagonist that is
recognizably a male Romantic while developing a
narrator who is altogether disembodied (and thereby
degendered), existing outside of space-time like
Volney's Genius, and who is thus able to traverse time
and reconstruct the minutia of historical events. Of
course, this historical imaginary is largely enabled by
Britain's privileged role as Queen of the seas:
Britain's powerful navy and colonial infrastructure
provide the unique vantage point from which Hemans can
project her piercing and acquisitive vision of modern
Greece.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Hemans's narrator can rather effortlessly distill
the national essence and history of a bygone people
largely by virtue of the statuary and architecture
whose ruins litter the landscape. In the tradition of
eighteenth-century ruinology, these fragments of art
are mined for their unique expression of national
identity. In the text, Hemans proffers the Athenian
city-state as a synecdoche for Greece itself. And
Athens is rendered knowable through an investigation of
the ruins of the Parthenon, which Hemans calls "the
purest model of Athenian taste" (LXXIV), locating in a
nation's art its peculiar sensibility. She also
subscribes to the eighteenth-century fascination with
the nationalist role of the bardic artist when she
hails Greece as the "fair land of Phidias," the
renowned sculptor and architect who oversaw the
building of the Parthenon and personally sculpted the
statue of Athena (or Minerva in the Roman lexicon),
which is stationed in its central shrine.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Yet, Hemans modifies this tradition by outfitting
the study of ruins with a capacity for augury. At will,
her narrator can recount the events that transpired
during the "closing night of that imperial race"
(XXXVII). Furthermore, by the agency of the creative
imagination, the narrator can also conjure up vivid
imagery of a pre-lapsarian Greece, recovering the
splendid vistas of a once glorious Athens from the
ruins of time:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Again renewed by Thought's creative spells,<br />
In all her pomp thy city, Theseus! Towers:<br />
Within, around, the light of glory dwells<br />
On art's fair fabrics, wisdom's holy bowers.<br />
There marble fanes in finished grace ascend,<br />
The pencil's world of life and beauty glows,<br />
Shrines, pillars, porticoes, in grandeur blend,<br />
Rich with the trophies of barbaric foes;<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .<br />
Athens! Thus fair the dream of thee appears,<br />
As Fancy's eye pervades the veiling cloud of years.
(LXXII-LXXIII)<br /></p>
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>
<p>By meditating upon the nation's ruins, the narrator
is able to precipitate a spell of imaginative
reconstruction whereby imperial Athens is delivered
from decay and presented at the height of its
<em>grandezza</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Interestingly, the Parthenon, which occupies a
special place in the text's discursive topography, is a
site that conflates Athenian nationalism and
imperialism. At the time of its construction, Athens
was pursuing an overt policy of imperial expansion. The
processional frieze depicted along the metopes and
pediments of the structure were meant to root the
nation's present imperial exploits in the nation's past
experience of warfare against human and mythological
enemies, each time concluding with a Grecian victory
that consolidated national identity and augmented
Athenian <em>grandezza</em>.<a href=
"#note38">[38]</a>
So, in truth, the Parthenon is a special memorial which
functions as a technology for channeling individual
desire into the production of a national sodality
premised on an invented tradition and its redeployment
in support of imperialism.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This technology and its product are symbolically
co-opted by Britain through the expropriation of the
Elgin Marbles, which are quite literally fragments of
this mythology because they are fragments of the
Parthenon's processional frieze. Thus, continues
Hemans's narrator: "Who may grieve that, rescued from
their hands, / Spoilers of excellence and foes to art,
/ thy relics, Athens! Borne to other lands, / Claim
homage still to thee from every heart?" (LXXXVIII). To
paraphrase, better that Britain, heir to the legacy of
imperial and civilizational <em>grandezza</em>, recover
these fragments than that they be lost to the ignorance
and obscurity of an orientalized and debased "second
race" whose only claim to them is that they happen to
be squatting upon the lands once occupied by a "nobler
race" of antique Greeks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>"In those fragments" we are told "the soul of Athens
lives" (XCI). Furthermore, "these [fragments] were
destined to a noble lot . . . to light another land,
the quenchless ray that soon shall gloriously expand"
(XCVII). Hemans proposes that art, as the embodiment of
national sensibility, can act as a conduit. This is, in
effect, how British literature was utilized in India
and elsewhere to interpellate Indian subjects with a
uniquely British sensibility, and thus produce
compliant colonial subjects under the ruse of spreading
civilization. <a href=
"#note39">[39]</a>
In this instance, however, art becomes the vehicle for
imperial <em>grandezza,</em> passing the torch of
empire from one nation to the next, thus quickening the
birth of another great civilization. Britain, we are
told, "hast [the] power to be what Athens e'er hath
been" (XCIX).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In a cautionary moment pregnant with patriotic
fervor, Hemans warns that to realize this destiny
Britain must first cultivate its own native
art&mdash;"treasures oft unprized,
unknown"&mdash;instead of prizing foreign "gems far
less rich than those, thus precious, and thus lost"
(C). <a href=
"#note40">[40]</a>
Imitating Volney and Gibbon, the narrator imagines a
post-lapsarian Britain whose imperial glory has
flickered and extinguished. Yet it too, like Greece,
can have an everlasting life-after-death in the
splendid ruins of its art and architecture. These can
serve to quicken the next turning of the imperial
gyre:</p>
<blockquote>
So, should dark ages o'er thy glory sweep,<br />
Should thine e'er be as now are Grecian plains,<br />
Nations unborn shall track thine own blue deep<br />
To hail thy shore, to worship thy remains;<br />
Thy mighty monuments with reverence trace.<br />
And cry, "This ancient soil hath nursed a glorious
race!" (CI)
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>
<p>In turning from this passage to the conclusion of
this study, I would like to point up the use of the
modal verb "should," whose conditionality indicates
that this apocalyptic vision is not an inexorable
consequence of the pursuit of empire vis-&agrave;-vis
the Sallustian and Machiavellian tradition. Returning
to the narrator's Gibbonesque chronicle of Greece's
fall, we discover that the cause of Greece's demise lay
not in any perceived contradiction between liberty and
empire, but in basic human frailty and error. The
narrator concludes that the Crescent horde succeeded in
single-handedly demolishing Greek culture not because
of the decadence wrought by the pursuit of empire, but
instead because of an avoidable and lamentable lack of
patriotic vigilance on the part of the Greek
defenders:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ye slept, O heroes! Chief ones of the earth!<br />
High demigods of ancient days! Ye slept:<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .<br />
No patriot then the sons of freedom led<br />
In mountain pass devotedly to die;<br />
The martyr spirit of resolve was fled,<br />
And the high soul's unconquered buoyancy,<br />
And by your graves, and on your battle plains,<br />
Warriors! your children knelt to wear the stranger's
chains. (XLII)</p>
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>
<p>Unlike the boy in <em>Casabianca</em> who needlessly
remains upon the burning deck out of filial affection
and patriotic zeal, the sons of Greece shrank from
patriotic self-sacrifice, and subsequently a
once-mighty nation fell.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>At the figurative center of this narrative is a
re-inscription of the vital role of the domestic sphere
in cultivating the proper degree of patriotism among
the sons of the nation. "O, where were then thy sons"
exclaims the narrator as the morning of Greece's fall
unfolds. Their absence during the invasion of their
homeland is telling because it reveals the ideological
poverty of the Grecian women charged with their
patriotic upbringing&mdash;who are also absent from the
scene! If we once again compare Hemans's steadfast
British child in <em>Casabianca</em> with these
derelict Grecian sons and mothers we discover a subtext
here about the vital role and presence of women in the
service of patriotism. Put glibly, the nation is only
as strong as its women.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>One clue to this can be found in the fore-grounded
figure of Minerva, the patron goddess of Athens who
represents the merger of fertility, wisdom, and martial
prowess. In the text, Minerva functions as a metonym
for the nation. At one point, Hemans addresses Greece
as "Minerva's land." She also uses the polysemic figure
of "Minerva's rent veil" as a symbol of Greece's fall.
Through the association of an ostensibly female,
domestic goddess with the nation and its fate, Hemans
proffers a symbolic affront to the modern notion of
separate spheres and insinuates a pre-ordained role for
women in civic discourse. <a href=
"#note41">[41]</a>
The negligence or erasure of this role leads to
spoliation and decline, figuratively represented by the
tattered veil, which variously signifies the cultural
and spiritual decline of the nation; the pillaging of
the nation's most cherished sites&mdash;in this case
the temple of Minerva within the Parthenon; or the
literal and metaphorical rape of the nation, resulting
in the extinction of a people and the procreation of an
utterly distinct "second race." But, by signaling that
these fates are in fact conditional and highly
contingent upon the domestic infrastructure of
patriotism, Hemans disputes the established position
that liberty and empire are in contradiction by placing
the blame for Greece's fall squarely on the deficient
patriotic instruction of its youth, while
simultaneously purveying an aggrandized and universal
vision of female nationalism relevant to all
epochs.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Ultimately, then, the ruins of modern Greece do
issue a warning to British society, but not one
consonant with Gibbon, Volney, or the tradition of
pastoral and abolitionist poetry that railed against
the corruptions of luxury wrought by unrestrained greed
and imperial ambition. Rather, Hemans mobilizes these
ruins to warn modern Britons not to pursue too
vigorously the ideology of separate spheres, which,
when too rigid, can foreclose the essential public role
played by women in the patriotic instruction of youth
and the maintenance of a patriotic morality in popular
culture. Through the very act of authoring <em>Modern
Greece,</em> Hemans underscores the participation of
women in the patriotic defense of the nation, for only
they, we are led to surmise from the text, can
circumvent the decline of the imperial nation through
the sedulous cultivation of the salutary and ultimately
redemptive domestic affections. Her argument is
compelling because it forces critics and historians to
explore how the counter-hegemonic demand for greater
female participation in public life and in the canons
of literature can seemingly paradoxically be made from
<em>within</em> the hegemonic and grossly masculine
discourses of nationalism and imperialism. However,
although this strategy ultimately did carve a public
space for female patriotism, it left intact the
institutions of patriarchy that continued to subjugate
women. And, rather than challenge the prescriptive
gender roles that propagated the figure of the lady,
with its characteristic feminine delicacy, moral
sympathy, and instinctive maternity, it objectively
fortified them. But perhaps what should most perturb
contemporary scholars about Hemans's argument is the
manifest reality of Britain's rapid post-imperial
decline. Strangely, it would seem that Hemans's new
breed of civic-minded patriotic ladies may have helped
to hasten Britain's decline precisely by fanning the
flames of jingoism and imperial lust ever higher, and
thus consuming in a shorter period the will and
resources which it took Hellenic Greece several hundred
years to exhaust.&nbsp; If imperialism has not brought
to the British nation the utter ruin projected by the
metanarratives of Gibbon and Volney, nonetheless it has
effected a remarkable diminution of Britain's once
formidable stature.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div id="notes_content">
<h4 align="center">Notes</h4>
<p class="indent">1. <em><a name="note1" id=
"note1"></a>Ozymandias</em> (1818), ll. 12-14.</p>
<p class="indent">2. <em><a name="note2" id="note2"></a>On
Seeing the Elgin Marbles</em> (1817), ll. 9-14.</p>
<p class="indent">3. <a name="note3" id="note3"></a>This
argument is convincingly posed by Anne Janowitz in
<em>England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National
Landscape</em> (1990).</p>
<p class="indent">4. <a name="note4" id="note4"></a>This is
Laurence Goldstein's argument in <em>Ruins and Empire: The
Evolution of a Theme in Augustan Romantic Literature</em>
(1977).</p>
<p class="indent">5. <a name="note5" id="note5"></a>The
conversation on Romantic ruins and fragments has had
several notable episodes. Paul de Man's classic study of
Shelley's <em>Triumph of Life</em>, &ldquo;Shelley
Disfigured&rdquo; (1984), argues that we must resist the
urge to seek semantic closure for the fragment poem through
its &ldquo;monumentalization&rdquo; as historical or
aesthetic object, a process that he claims arbitrarily
settles meaning within a pre-determined historical or
semantic order (121). In Thomas McFarland's <em>Romanticism
and the Forms of Ruin</em>, the fragmentary is instead
elevated to a cultural theme. In this
expressivist-essentialist model, Romanticism is the
emblematic expression of a phenomenological reality
characterized by the &ldquo;diasparactive&rdquo; triad of
incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin (5-7). This
reality, which is not necessarily mediated by social and
political history, manifests in Romantic literature as the
expression of longing and melancholy that terminate in a
&ldquo;sentiment des ruines&rdquo; (15). Marjorie
Levinson's <em>The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a
Form</em> (1986) disputes this claim and argues instead for
a historically nuanced reading of the fragment poem that
disentangles the history of its composition, publication,
and reception from the signification produced by the early
nineteenth-century literary milieu and the legacy of
Romantic ideology influencing modern critical discourse
(8). Methodologically, this study most closely resembles
Levinson's in its attention to historical facts and
ideological determination. Yet it is not, per se, a study
of the fragment as phenomenon or form.</p>
<p class="indent">6. <a name="note6" id="note6"></a>See
also Nairn's <em>Break-Up of Britain</em> (1977) and
<em>After Britain</em> (2000), Samuel's three-volume
collection <em>Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of
British Identity</em> (late 1980s), Hitchens's <em>The
Abolition of Britain</em> (1999), and Marr's BBC
documentary and book <em>The Day Britain Died</em> (2000).
For an excellent review of this literature, see also Stuart
Ward's &ldquo;The End of Empire and the Fate of
Britishness&rdquo; (2004).</p>
<p class="indent">7. <a name="note7" id="note7"></a>This,
indeed, is the subject of Suvir Kual's <em>Poems of Nation,
Anthems of Empire</em> (2000): 'Rule, Britannia!' . . . is
testimonial to the fact that poets in the long eighteenth
century imagined poetry to be a unique and privileged
literary form for the enunciation of a puissant (and
plastic) vocabulary of nation, particularly one appropriate
to a Britain proving itself . . . great at home and
abroad&rdquo; (5).</p>
<p class="indent">8. <a name="note8" id=
"note8"></a>Shaftesbury's <em>Characteristicks</em> (1714)
is very much a recapitulation of the classical argument for
Christian morality espoused by landed Tory aristocrats over
and against an emergent bourgeois culture that emphasized
the ameliorating effects of personal industry and commerce,
despite being driven by self-interest and monetary reward.
In many respects, Mandeville, a Dutch native raised in a
commercial society where the state facilitated commercial
and colonial expansion, is the mouthpiece for bourgeois
cultural transvaluation against an established hegemonic
aristocratic culture whose values and sensibility are
rooted in the classical doctrine of &ldquo;virtu,&rdquo;
which is based on the ownership of land and feudal social
relations. J.G.A. Pocock's &ldquo;The Mobility of Property
and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology&rdquo; (1985)
provides an excellent study of this tension.</p>
<p class="indent">9. <a name="note9" id="note9"></a>Both
arguments flow from Giambattista Vico's argument that
destructive passions can be harnessed for the public
good.</p>
<p class="indent">10. <a name="note10" id="note10"></a>The
term comes from John Brewer's <em>The Sinews of Power: War,
Money and the English State, 1688-1783</em> (1989).</p>
<p class="indent">11. <a name="note11" id=
"note11"></a>&ldquo;It was thus,&rdquo; continues Hume in
<em>Of Simplicity and Refinement</em>, &ldquo;the ASIATIC
eloquence degenerated so much from the ATTIC: It was thus
the age of CLAUDIUS and NERO became so much inferior to
that of AUGUSTUS in taste and genius: And perhaps there
are, at present, some symptoms of a like degeneracy of
taste, in FRANCE as well as in ENGLAND&rdquo; (<em>Essays
Moral Political and Literary</em> 196). Cultural
refinement, swelled with age and imperial growth, leads to
decadence and degeneracy, following the cyclical pattern of
rise and decline.</p>
<p class="indent">12. <a name="note12" id="note12"></a>In
1781, after completing the first part of his narrative on
the fall of the Western Roman empire and before embarking
on the second part concerning the fall of the Eastern Roman
empire, Gibbon wrote his <em>General Observations on the
Fall of the Roman Empire in the West</em>, an essay which
was appended to the end of Chapter 38 of <em>The
Decline</em>. In it, he writes, &ldquo;The decline of Rome
was the natural and inevitable result of immoderate
greatness. Prosperity ripened the principles of decay; the
causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of
conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the
artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the
pressure of its own weight&rdquo; (IV.XXXVIII.119).</p>
<p class="indent">13. <a name="note13" id=
"note13"></a>Contra Smith, Malthus argues that &ldquo;the
increasing wealth of the nation has had little or no
tendency to better the condition of the labouring
poor&rdquo; (<em>An Essay on the Principle of
Population</em> XVI.112). Indeed, he suggests that the
opposite may more likely be true.</p>
<p class="indent">14. <a name="note14" id="note14"></a>See
also Colley's chapter on &ldquo;Womanpower&rdquo;
(237-81).</p>
<p class="indent">15. <a name="note15" id="note15"></a>Kate
Davies convincingly argues that female involvement in the
early abolition movement strengthened it because of its
presumed non-political character. Females were attracted to
the movement because of the delicacy of &ldquo;feminine
sympathy&rdquo; toward the suffering of slaves, which
tinctured the abolitionist movement with a moral imperative
ratified by the purported moral authority invested in
females. See also &ldquo;A Moral Purchase; Femininity,
Commerce, and Abolition, 1788-1792&rdquo; (2001).</p>
<p class="indent">16. <a name="note16" id="note16"></a>See
also Mellor's &ldquo;The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two
Traditions of British Women's Poetry, 1780-1830&rdquo;
(1997).</p>
<p class="indent">17. <a name="note17" id="note17"></a>In
&ldquo;Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer
and the Tradition of Dissent&rdquo; (1994), Marlon Ross
argues that for Romantic women writers the act of writing,
and furthermore of writing on behalf of liberal reform
initiatives, constituted a &ldquo;double dissension&rdquo;
that could be mitigated by generic manipulation of two
sorts: either disguise women's political speech in
acceptably feminine modes like the conduct manual or
feminize conventional political modes (94).</p>
<p class="indent">18. <a name="note18" id="note18"></a>In
&ldquo;Consuming women: The Life of the &lsquo;Literary
Lady&rdquo; as Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century
England&rdquo; (1993), Paula McDowell elaborates the
argument that iconic images of femininity circulated
alongside female texts in eighteenth-century print culture
and lent them a unique marketing edge that also placed
heavy constraints upon the public image of female authors.
This is because readers consumed female texts as much for
the commodified images of femininity associated with the
author as for content of the texts themselves.</p>
<p class="indent">19. <a name="note19" id="note19"></a>See
also Tricia Lootens's &ldquo;Hemans and her American Heirs:
Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry and National
Identity&rdquo; (1999) for a discussion of Hemans's
American reception as a trans-atlantic patriotic poet.</p>
<p class="indent">20. <a name="note20" id="note20"></a>With
the exception of Scott and Byron, Hemans generated more
revenue by the sale of the multiple editions of her works
than any other Romantic contemporary. Paula R. Feldman
documents this phenomenon in &ldquo;The Poet and the
Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace&rdquo;
(1999).</p>
<p class="indent">21. <em><a name="note21" id=
"note21"></a>The Edinburgh Monthly Review</em> 3 (April
1820): 373-83, cited in Felicia Hemans: <em>Selected Poems,
Letters, Reception Materials</em>, ed. Susan J. Wolfson,
531.</p>
<p class="indent">22. <em><a name="note22" id=
"note22"></a>The Edinburgh Review</em> 50 (October 1829):
32-47, cited in Wolfson 551.</p>
<p class="indent">23. <a name="note23" id="note23"></a>In
<em>Ambitious Heights</em> (1990), Norma Clarke reveals
that &ldquo;the poet of domesticity, of hearth and home,
had skeletons rattling by the fireside,&rdquo; including a
husband's desertion and the abandoning of her children's
welfare to her mother, sister, and brother's good will
(45-8).</p>
<p class="indent">24. <a name="note24" id=
"note24"></a>Susan Wolfson, in &ldquo;'Domestic Affections'
and &lsquo;the spear of Minerva': Felicia Hemans and the
Dilemma of Gender&rdquo; (1994), has argued that Hemans
deeply deplored the prescriptions of femininity that
consigned her to a life of shattered domesticity after her
husband's departure, and constrained her to write behind a
domestic mask out of the economic necessity of providing
for her family. She manages this situation by casting an
array of female characters in her poetry that reflect the
suffering endured by women as a result of their
sequestration and subjection to losses inflicted by the
masculine world of politics and war. As compensation, many
of her characters model an almost stoical degree of heroism
in the face of insurmountable suffering. Hence, her
patriotic stance may well be an adaptation to the
deplorable fate of women in a male-dominated society where
the tranquility of domestic space is constantly imperiled
by political intrigue and warfare.</p>
<p class="indent">25. <a name="note25" id="note25"></a>See
the <em>Letter to John Murray</em> (26 February, 1817),
cited in Wolfson 480-1. These marbles&mdash;scavenged from
the ruins of the Parthenon and imported to London by Lord
Elgin in 1804, and eventually sold to the British
government in 1816&mdash;are featured in Keats's
self-reflexive poem, <em>On Seeing the Elgin Marbles</em>
(1817). But they were also the subject of a popular furor
over their rightful ownership involving Byron when he, in
Part II of <em>Childe Harold</em> (1812), explicitly
deplores their theft. Interestingly, contemporary reviewers
believed <em>Modern Greece</em> to have been written by
Byron despite the fact that the poem clearly weighs-in in
favor of this expropriation of Grecian art. See the review
of <em>Modern Greece</em> in <em>The New British Ladies
Magazine</em> n.s. 1 (1817): 70. See also Susan Wolfson's
study of Heman's relationship with Byron and his poetry in
&ldquo;Hemans and the Romance of Byron&rdquo; (2001).</p>
<p class="indent">26. <a name="note26" id="note26"></a>We
know from Chorley that Volney was also quite influential on
the young poet Hemans. He cites a correspondence from
Bishop Heber that reveals Hemans's abandoned plan for a
syncretistic poem along the lines of Volney's
<em>Ruins</em>, in which her design was &ldquo;to trace out
the symbolical meaning, by which the popular faiths of
every land are linked together&rdquo; (I.46-7). One can
infer from Daniel White's &ldquo;'Mysterious Sanctity':
Sectarianism and Syncretism from Volney to Hemans&rdquo;
that Hemans most likely did eventually complete her
syncretistic and pietistic poem under the title of
<em>Superstition and Revelation</em>, a twenty-eight stanza
poem that argues for the universality of Christianity as
the root of all other creeds, which are revealed to be
superstitious adulterations of Christian revelation.</p>
<p class="indent">27. <a name="note27" id="note27"></a>See
<em>The British Review and London Critical Journal</em> 15
(June 1820): 299-310, cited in Wolfson 532.</p>
<p class="indent">28. <a name="note28" id="note28"></a>The
erudition of these notes led one early reviewer to believe
that the anonymous poem could not have been the production
of a &ldquo;female pen&rdquo; and must surely have been the
work of a presumably male &ldquo;academical pen.&rdquo; See
<em>The British Review and London Critical Journal</em> 15
(June 1820): 299-310, cited in Wolfson 532.</p>
<p class="indent">29. <a name="note29" id=
"note29"></a>Trinder posits that Gibbon was the inspiration
behind Hemans'<em>s Alaric in Italy</em> (24-5).</p>
<p class="indent">30. <a name="note30" id=
"note30"></a>Hemans is here operating within the mode of
modern orientalism. As Said has explicated, the modern
orientalist performs a vital function for imperialism by
discursively mastering and dominating those peoples and
regions under its scrutiny. According to Said, the practice
of &ldquo;discovering&rdquo; the East operates within a
modern paradigm of orientalism that figures the East as
backwards and essentially knowable because it occupies a
past stage in Western development. Said explains that this
paradigm is contrary to classical orientalism, which
figures the East as exotic, essentially different from the
West, and therefore inscrutable (<em>Orientalism</em>
120-3). Byron's treatment of Greece and the Levant in
<em>Childe Harold</em> adheres closer to the latter
mode.</p>
<p class="indent">31. <a name="note31" id="note31"></a>In a
letter to John Murray dated 4 September 1917, Byron,
bristled by this wordplay, indignantly retorts,
&ldquo;Besides, why &lsquo;<em>modern</em>?' You may say
<em>modern Greeks</em>, but surely <em>Greece</em> itself
is rather more ancient than ever it was&rdquo; (cited in
Wolfson 536; his emphasis).</p>
<p class="indent">32. <a name="note32" id=
"note32"></a>Saree Makdisi makes a similar argument for
Shelley's description of the East in <em>Alastor</em>,
where he discursively depopulates and reduces to ruins the
entirety of Eastern territories in order to enable a
reframing of the East as pre-modern space situation within
a historical continuum that leads teleologically to Western
European civilization. See also his <em>Romantic
Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of
Modernity</em> (1998) for a more advanced elaboration of
this argument.</p>
<p class="indent">33. <a name="note33" id="note33"></a>This
difference can perhaps help to explain why Byron spoke so
fervently in behalf of Greek nationalism while Hemans
preferred to subject Greek society to the tutelage of a
more &ldquo;civilized&rdquo; British empire.</p>
<p class="indent">34. <a name="note34" id="note34"></a>See
also <em>Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation</em>. Pratt offers Mungo Park's
<em>Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa</em> as a
text that exemplifies the central traits of a
&ldquo;sentimental narrator.&rdquo; The &ldquo;sentimental
narrator&rdquo; is defined as experiential, innocent,
passive, and imperiled by natives, thereby deflecting any
claim to imperial ambitions, when, in fact, this narrator
is performing the necessary task of collecting data on
unexplored territories. The narrator also inverts imperial
reality by presenting soon-to-be conquered natives as
dangerous aggressors while depicting the imperialist West
as fundamentally benign, inquisitive, and innocent.</p>
<p class="indent">35. <a name="note35" id="note35"></a>Ward
contends that sameness, not alterity, is the primary force
that consolidated a cohesive British identity by
psychologically binding Britain with its white settler
communities across the globe (245). Accepting this, their
globally scattered graves also work to engrave a British
presence upon disparate and far-flung regions of the globe,
symbolically annexing these territories to a British
Commonwealth.</p>
<p class="indent">36. <a name="note36" id="note36"></a>See
the <em>Letter to John Murray</em> (26 February, 1817),
cited in Wolfson 480-1.</p>
<p class="indent">37. <a name="note37" id="note37"></a>See
Byron's <em>Letter to John Murray</em> (4 September 1817),
cited in Wolfson 536.</p>
<p class="indent">38. <a name="note38" id=
"note38"></a>Sophia Psarra promulgates this argument in
&ldquo;The Parthenon and the Erechtheion: The Architectural
Formation of Place, Politics, and Myth.&rdquo; Her study
focuses on two adjacent structures that stand upon the
Acropolis: the Parthenon and the Erechtheion. The former
roots present imperial exploits in the nation's past,
thereby granting it legitimacy, while the latter anchors an
ancient religion and mythology in the present, granting
continuity to the nation's culture.</p>
<p class="indent">39. <a name="note39" id=
"note39"></a>Sarah Suleri's <em>The Rhetoric of English
India</em> (1992) and Gauri Viswanathan's <em>Masks of
Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India</em>
(1989) pursue this theme at length.</p>
<p class="indent">40. <a name="note40" id=
"note40"></a>Here, Hemans takes up the cause of the native
arts movement, following in the footsteps of Blake,
Wordsworth, and numerous other British poets and painters.
For more on this, see also Morris Eaves's <em>The
Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of
Blake</em> (1992).</p>
<p class="indent">41. <a name="note41" id="note41"></a>In
&ldquo;Minerva's Veil: Hemans, Critics, and the
Construction of Gender&rdquo; (1997), Eubanks suggests that
the figure of Minerva, the warrior goddess, which is
central to Hemans's description of the Greek national
mythology, is a symbolic affront to the doctrine of
separate spheres (345).</p>
</div>
<div id="wc_content">
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1776-1837</em>. Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner.
Philadelphia: U Pennslyvania P, 1994. 128-66.</p>
<p class="hang">---. &ldquo;Hemans and the Romance of
Byron.&rdquo; <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the
Nineteenth Century</em>. Eds. Nanora Sweet and Julie
Melnyk. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 155-80.</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/crocco-francesco">Crocco, Francesco</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/gender" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gender</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/623" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">nationalism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/628" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">empire</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1285" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">imperialism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1562" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">nation</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1760" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">patriotism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/felicia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Felicia</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/volney" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Volney</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/gibbon" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gibbon</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1775" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">modern</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/country/greece-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Greece</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1777" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">luxury</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1778" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ruin</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1779" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">patriot</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1780" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Parthenon</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/athena" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Athena</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1782" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">grandeur</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1783" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">decline</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1784" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">grandezza</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1785" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">fall</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/napoleon-bonaparte" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Napoleon Bonaparte</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/bernard-mandeville" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bernard Mandeville</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/bruce-haley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bruce Haley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/edward-gibbon-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edward Gibbon</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-armitage" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David Armitage</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/percy-bysshe-shelley-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/felicia-dorothea-hemans" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Felicia Dorothea Hemans</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/henry-f-chorley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry F. Chorley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/felicia-dorothea-browne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Felicia Dorothea Browne</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/rome" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Rome</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/egypt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Egypt</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/syria" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Syria</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/italy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Italy</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/spain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spain</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/greece" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Greece</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/wales" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wales</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/asia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Asia</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/americas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Americas</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:39:22 +0000rc-admin22728 at http://www.rc.umd.edu